CornDog Man and my t-shirt store

Yes, I’ve been away for a while, but it’s been a little crazy. One thing I did during my blog hiatus was to finally start a Cafepress store where some of my creature designs are now immortalized on a variety of t-shirts. People have been asking me to do this for 17 years and I have always said no, partly because I didn’t want to be in the souvenir business, and partly because I think hawking merchandise tends to take away from a researcher’s reputation.

It was the Yahoo group Unknown Creature Spot and their dialogue about dog men in cornfields — which devolved into something called CornDog Man — that finally nudged me into an e-commerce experiment. They asked if I would draw a cartoon of this creature for them, and I obliged, and then they began asking if they could get CornDog Man t-shirts. Truth be told, I kind of wanted one myself. So I took the plunge and opened a Cafepress store, which handles all the messy business stuff like printing, stocking and shipping, and set up a few CornDog Man shirt models. I enjoyed seeing my art on t-shirts so much that I added a couple of others; my original Beast of Bray Road sketch, a Bigfoot head, and my Weird Deer emblem.

I don’t know how long I’ll stay in the creature-T biz, I surely don’t expect to get rich from it. But I guess if a few people get a kick out of wearing my artwork, there’s nothing wrong with that. And I will probably be my own best customer, I already ordered a green Weird Deer shirt for my own summer wardrobe. And the CornDog Man, of course, in corny golden yellow.